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Every webmaster wants to know how many hits his website is getting, whether it be daily, monthly or just sporadically; but with so many stat tools availble, which one is the best to use? In this article, we’ll review some of the top systems available.

1. Google Analytics

In my opinion, Google Analytics is the best free stat tool out there. Google Analytics is a very comprehensive stat tool which can tell alot about the traffic of your website. It provides in depth information, and can be valuable to the success of your website.

Main Features of Google Analytics:

Detailed graphs of your statistics

Geographical information on where your visitors originate from

Detailed statisitcs in general e.g. Site Usage, Bounce Rates.

Overviews on traffic e.g. Content overview and Traffic overview

Goals, which is a feature that measures how well your site fulfills business objectives.

Advantages

Detailed statistical information

Accurate statistics, along with high quality graphs

The ability to review any date period to check out stats recorded on that date

Disadvantages

For someone who’s relatively new to being a webmaster, Google Analytics’ sheer amount of information it gives may be slightly overwhelming to a new user.

2. WordPress Stats (Plugin)

If you’re a blogger, there’s a good change that you use WordPress! If you are running WordPress, you might want to consider using WordPress Stats.

Main Features of WordPress Stats:

Integrates right into your WordPress installation

Provides information on referrals, clicks, key search terms and more

Integrates into your WordPress Admin Dashboard, so you can always keep track of your stats

Any information recorded is instant as it happens. So if someone clicked on a page on your website, WordPress Stats would update almost instantly.

Advantages

Minimal Setup required (Because it’s a plugin, all script lines that need to be added for it to work are inputted automatically)

Specifically designed for WordPress websites, so it’s a stats system you can trust if your using WordPress

Produces a graph which updates as hits are recorded. This is displayed on both the blog stats page and WordPress admin dashboard.

Disadvantages

It’s only for WordPress

Not as in depth as others, but does its job well.

3. Woopra

Woopra is a bit like Google Analytics, because they both provide similar statistic information to their users. It is slightly unique as it is split into two services: a desktop client program and a web server application. You are also able to track single users and where they go on your website in seconds. Features like this are valuable to your website success and show how good your content is.

Main Features of Woopra:

Live Stat Monitoring

Provides two different services: desktop client program and a web server application

Provides in-depth analytical information as well as general stats.

Innovative stats system

The new Woopra Analytics

Advantages

You are able to see your stats on your desktop thanks to the Desktop Application

Stats are live and update instantly.

The Woopra API

Because of the API, there are a handful of plugins to integrate Woopra with blogs and other website services.

Disadvantages

Woopra is currently BETA (So there are bugs that are yet to be found or are being fixed)

Requires a bit of time to fully setup.

When Woopra is out of Beta, free and paid plans will be in place, so this may hint that some systems are going to be limited to free users.

4. Alexa Web Information

Alexa, is a bit of a different stat system, it’s what you could call a public stat system. Why public? Because every website in its crawl list is viewable by anyone, which means anyone can look at another websites statistics. Not only are they public but they also have there own traffic rank system to list websites in there crawl list. In some peoples views someone would consider Alexa as not worth mentioning, but I believe it provides some useful information.

Uses own Alexa Traffic rank system to list websites according to those most popular

Advantages

Once a website is crawled, Alexa will update the information automatically.

Don’t need to sign up for an account to view any websites statistics

Data is updated quite regularly

Disadvantages

It’s not the most accurate system to use

Isn’t as in depth as others stat systems

Alexa is not a live stat service. Usually stats are updated daily or every two or so days.

Because Alexa has its own traffic rank system it may not represent a websites true position in the web.

5. Compete

Compete provides analytical information but also allows anyone to view websites that it has collected information on, similarly to Alexa. Compete has a diverse sample of websites and works with samples of internet users and analyzes the web pages they visit.

Main Features of Compete:

Combination of Analytics and general stats

Like Alexa it is also a public stat system (Anyone can view website stats which have been collected)

Branches out into different self service tools.

Compete is based on samples of people’s internet activity

Advantages

Valuable to a business/corporate website

Different ranges of analytical information

A variety of Self Service tools

Disadvantages

It is generally not for the average user. More for the business/marketing sector

Compete isn’t free. Only basic information is available for free users. Again this is due to Compete being aimed at businesses and not general websites.

July has been an interesting month for web developers. Aside from some excellent tutorials, interesting announcements from major web companies have come to light. New homepage designs, new APIs and other announcements have been put forth by Google, Twitter, and other big web players.

July has been an interesting month for web developers. Aside from some excellent tutorials, interesting announcements from major web companies have come to light. New homepage designs, new APIs and other announcements have been put forth by Google, Twitter, and other big web players.

The times, they are a changin'!

Author: Admin

I love web designing and I really like to work on the web. I started web designing as a hobby.

Discussing PHP Frameworks: What, When, Why and Which?

It seems like every other day I decide that I'm going to start using a different PHP framework for various projects. Nuope has a fantastic article on what PHP frameworks are, and which might be best for you.

20 jQuery Tutorials and Plugins to Impress Your Friends

I know, I know. Only a true geek (with really geeky companions) would want to impress their friends with jQuery tutorials and plugins. That said, the article has some intriguing techniques that you might not find in other roundups, like the jQuery Sliding Puzzle Plugin.

How to Debug PHP Using Firefox with FirePHP

Six Revisions has a really useful tutorial for developers wanting to debug PHP. Using a cocktail of Firefox, Firebug and FirePHP, you'll learn how to correctly debug faulty PHP code from within the browser.

20+ Ready to Use Auto Completion Scripts

Auto-completion is becoming more and more popular. Sites like Google and Facebook have both pushed the technology into the forefront of web development practices, so much that it's almost weird to not see auto completion on search boxes. The Dzine Blog has over 20 useful ways to add auto completion into your app.

15 Creative Wordpress Footers

The footer of a blog is often an overlooked feature when it comes to laying out a site. Designussion has 15 exception Wordpress footers to draw inspiration from. Oh, and did you notice which site was the first example? ;)

What Web 2.0 can learn from Online 1.0

History can always teach us a thing or two when we're developing web applications. If you've got the time, take a peek at this comprehensive 8-part article showcasing some of yesteryear's best web applications, and what they can teach us about building great modern web apps.

WordPress Resources - 48 Resources, Tips, Tricks & Themes

It wasn't long ago that animation in web development was traditionally left to Flash developers. But Javascript has become a lot more versatile and simple, thanks to frameworks like jQuery. Kevin at Queness has unearthed 16 examples of Javascript animation techniques and uses that you'll probably find interesting. (I just think it's amazing that all of this is being done with Javascript now!)

Coding a Clean & Illustrative Web Design from Scratch

Illustrative designs have been quite the rage, and they can certainly be more of a challenge to break apart on the programming level. Six Revisions has a comprehensive tutorial on how to blend illustrations with proper markup.

Creating an Ajax Web App Using the Bitly API

Envato's own Themeforest has a nifty tutorial on how to make an URL shortener using the Bitly API. The tutorial also shows how to add "URL lengthening", or showing the original url before it was shortened.

15 PHP Regular Expressions for Web Developers

Jean at Cats Who Code (what a cool name!) has some common PHP regular expressions that web developers find themselves using often. Finding page titles and validating domain names are some that I find myself needing more often than not.

Creative Resume

Codeburner

Codeburner, a Firefox extension by the good people at SitePoint, is a web developer extension that makes developing sites easier by adding reference data right inside the test environment. PLUS, you'll get a free copy of the ebook Build Your Own Firefox Extension with a download of Codeburner.

Free Typographic XHTML/CSS Layouts

Twitter's New Homepage Design

A couple days ago Twitter launched their new homepage design that, most importantly, prominently features the real-time search box. Aside from changing the look and feel of the homepage, it's very apparent that the site is now trying to position itself to make more money. TechCrunch has a nice write-up on the changes and the thinking behind them.

Case Study: Good and Bad APIs

Introducing Google Chrome OS

Earlier this month Google launched an ambitious project: the Google Chrome OS. The Chrome OS is a lightweight operating system that will be targeted at netbooks and smaller computers, with a focus on speed and simplicity.

Anchoring Estimates

Ben Northrop has an essential tip to determining project estimates for freelance programmers. Essentially, Ben recommends using an anchor to determine how much to charge for a project. For example, you could use a similar, previous project to base the current project's cost off of. Great tip!

This article aims to attract users who want to attract their website. This post is for anyone with a web site. Some of they may not apply to you and your business. But hopefully, you will find this post inspirational.

Fresh Content

One of the main ways is to update your content as much as possible. Always keep it up tp date.

Listen to what others have to say

If you are already lucky enough to have a community or even just some regular users, listen to them. You can do this by emailing your users directly, setting up comment forms, live chat, or even user feedback systems such as UserVoice, which allow users to vote on site issues and functionality.

Take Part Online

When you read your favorite blog or read an article of interest, leave a comment with your name, email and web site address. Ensure you are an active member of a relevant forum discussion or networking group. Make sure you are seen to be an active member of your site’s online community sector.

Email Signature

Whenever you send out an email, make sure you have your URL attached to the email signature. Simple idea but effective.

Competition

On the flip side of winning an award, running a competition can be just as beneficial to your analytics stats. This could be as simple as designing a new logo or coming up with a new name for your latest product. Either way this will attract more users to your site and show you are giving back to your users as well as taking.

Search Engine Optimisation

Effective SEO, common sense and web standards go hand-in-hand. The idea is to create a semantic, valid code, that essentially uses the right tool for the job. This means using the right HTML tags and having a unique title and meta data for each page. Ensure search engine spiders can correctly index your site and good content is a must. Remember the most important way to climb the search engine ranks is through quality links. For full information on this see the Google Webmasters/Site owners guidelines.